At the last Teaching & Learning Committee meeting, we were sketching out a revised draft of a memo to faculty members, intended to showcase strategies to reduce costs to students. One of the items was about open education resources and the like, so I floated the idea of the website. And, just like that, boom. Green light for the website. Which meant I had to throw something together pretty darned quickly, to be online in time for the memo to be finalized and sent out.
To start out the new year, I’m moving to a new position at the University of Calgary. I am now “Manager, Technology Integration Group” in the new Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. That’s a mouthful.
Basically, I get to work with a great team, building tools to enhance teaching and learning, and supporting instructors and students to integrate these tools effectively. In many ways, it’s a formalization of the kinds of things I’ve been doing in various roles on campus, but with some truly amazing people to work with, and resources to dedicate to the task. The mandate is essentially: support the successful integration of appropriate technologies into teaching and learning, and work with instructors and researchers to build and extend tools to enhance the learning environment.
Here’s a gem that shows what happens when you talk about stuff in the open. Mike Caulfield asked a question about structuring a wiki. John Robertson replied, with a nudge to Brian Lamb. Boom. Here’s your MOOC on structuring a wiki in an academic context.
I’ve been withdrawing from relying on Google wherever possible, for various reasons. One place where I was still stuck in the Googleverse was with the embedded site search I was using on my self-hosted static file photo gallery site. That was one of the few places where I couldn’t find a decent replacement for Google, so it stayed there. And I wasn’t comfortable with that - I don’t think Google needs to be informed every time someone visits a page I host1. I use that embedded search pretty regularly, and cringe every time the page loads.
I’ve been lucky enough to know Stephen for over a decade - first meeting him as part of the Edusource national learning object repository project back in 2001(?!). Even back then, Stephen had ideas that were years ahead of where everyone else was. We all looked at him like he was crazy, but he persisted. And eventually we realized he was right.
“If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place in the country, say, just in the last 50 years – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and so on – they’re not led by any debate in the media,” Chomsky said. “No, they were led by popular organizations, by activists on the ground.”
I have been running adblockers as browser extensions, CSS overrides, and .htaccess filters for years now. It’s not bulletproof, but it sure takes care of most of the ads. The web is a much less tacky place with these tools in place.
But, in my role as a lowly edtech geek, I’ve been bitten by this before. Case in point: we’d gotten reports from instructors who were seeing ads in our Desire2Learn environment. WTF? I’ve never seen any ads. That’s not possible. They must be mistaken, or have a popup from somewhere else. Then, I checked on my phone, without Flash and without any adblockers, and saw this:
An article on The Guardian that initially seems like an “OH NO KIDS THESE DAYS!” reaction to everyone having a decent phone in their pocket 24/7. I was prepared to read it through, groan, and then ignore it.
Then, this gem from Nick Knight, a fashion photographer:
But doesn’t incessant picture-taking, as psychologists argue, make us forget? “That’s old rubbish,” says Knight. “Like that old nonsense about how sitting too close to the TV will infuse you with x-rays. My dad went around a lot of the time shooting with a video camera when I was a kid. Now we have lots of great old home videos as a result. So what if someone stands in front of a Matisse and takes a picture to look at on the bus home? I think that’s great if they want to.”
Hugh Howey is the author of some really great science fiction novels. Most famously, his “WOOL” collection (the Silo Series), but also his Molly Fyde series is definitely worth picking up.
He has been an indy author/publisher, hitting the scene through online distribution of his books. Here’s his thoughts on that:
Where you once had vanity presses that suckered people out of tens of thousands of dollars for crates of books that would never get sold, you now have the ability to make professional-looking books that are in print forever at a fraction of the cost. And people still want to focus on the fact that “most authors lose money.” No shit. Most musicians lose money. Most painters lose money. Most photographers lose money. It’s art. Nobody is really losing anything. We are creating something. We are expressing ourselves. We are doing something positive and lasting with our free time. There’s no losing here, only winning.
We’re in the middle of our Fall 2013 “Pilot” semester - almost 5,000 students are using D2L this semester, with extremely positive feedback from students and instructors. We’re now in the process of setting up for the Winter 2014 semester - where 4 faculties will be moving to use Desire2Learn for 100% of their online- and blended courses (and many courses from other faculties thrown in for good measure). Likely 10-12,000 students using it next semester. That’s a lot of students. And a lot of courses. We still don’t have automated course creation integrated with PeopleSoft, and are working feverishly on that (the thought of managing course enrolments for 12,000 students using CSV uploads makes me break into a cold sweat).
I still can’t figure out why this isn’t baked into the Evernote application as a Service available system-wide, but there’s a way to add a Service to send messages from Mail into Evernote as notes for archive. There was a previous applescript solution, but I hadn’t used it (and it apparently borked on the 10.9 upgrade anyway).
I’d been using the Evernote email address feature, to just forward messages I need to archive for automatic importing into Evernote, but it’s a pain. I have to remove the *FWD: * prefix on the note title. I need to decrease the indented quote level of messages. etc… It works, but it’s funky.
Just checked my RSS reader - I subscribe to 79 101 feeds tagged as “edublogs”. Not all are active - some are still in there, in the hopes that the owner of the site comes back to play. It’s also not comprehensive. There are lots of feeds I don’t subscribe to. But, these are my go-to reads, with a decent signal:noise ratio, with little breathless hype. Likely not everyone’s cup of feed, but I find them useful.
